1984 - Planet eBook

‘bad’ when applied to its enemies. But in addition there weregreat numbers of words which at first sight appeared to bemere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colournot from their meaning, but from their structure.So far as it could be contrived, everything that had ormight have political significance of any kind was fitted intothe B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or bodyof people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or publicbuilding, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape;that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallestnumber of syllables that would preserve the original derivation.In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the RecordsDepartment, in which Winston Smith worked, was calledRECDEP, the Fiction Department was called FICDEP, theTeleprogrammes Department was called TELEDEP, and soon. This was not done solely with the object of saving time.Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescopedwords and phrases had been one of the characteristicfeatures of political language; and it had been noticed thatthe tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was mostmarked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations.Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO,COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP. In the beginningthe practice had been adopted as it were instinctively,but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. Itwas perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowedand subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most ofthe associations that would otherwise cling to it. The wordsCOMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, for instance, call up